Signifying Europe - Softcover

Fornäs, Johan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841505218 ISBN 13: 9781841505213

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This book systematically and consistently analyses a wide range of symbols for Europe, critically interpreting their often contradictory or ambiguous dimensions of meaning and uncovering several astonishing aspects of how Europe is currently identified - from above by the political elites as well as from below in critical arts or everyday life; from the inside by European actors but also from the outside by its surrounding others. The focus is on the European Union's main symbols, but they are interpreted in relation to a diverse range of other alternatives, so as to uncover the main facets of Europe as it is currently symbolised. An ePDF version of this book is available for free download from the OAPEN platform: Signifying Europe.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Johan Fornäs is professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Sweden, director of the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden, and the editor of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current CulturalResearch.

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Signifying Europe

By Johan Fornäs

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-521-3

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
Chapter 1: Name and Myth, 5, 
Chapter 2: Identifying Symbols, 43, 
Chapter 3: Symbols of a Union, 61, 
Chapter 4: Day, 85, 
Chapter 5: Motto, 103, 
Chapter 6: Flag, 115, 
Chapter 7: Anthem, 149, 
Chapter 8: Currency, 205, 
Chapter 9: Projecting Europe, 251, 
Notes, 267, 
References, 299, 
List of Figure Sources, 321, 
Index, 325, 

CHAPTER 1

Name and Myth

One of the most important symbols that identify an entity is its name. In many cases, names are often overlooked and taken for granted in ordinary usage. 'Europe' is a splendid example: it is never analysed or mentioned in official EU documents, as it can hardly be replaced — being inherited since antiquity, not seriously questioned or contested by any alternative name, and therefore not an object of political choice. Other geographic names may well be questioned — think for instance of Macedonia or Kurdistan. But there is an evident consensus on how to name this continent, even though its external boundaries are not fixed.

Even so, the name of Europe is an important verbal symbol that carries specific associations, though they are today a matter of naturalised habit rather than of conscious interpretation. Being much older than the official EU symbols, it deserves to be treated first, as the latter cannot avoid being intertextually affected by the meanings attached to it — and to the mythological figure of Europa, to which the name is intrinsically linked.

What's in a name — and in a myth?

Juliet: 'What's in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.'

It is not surprising that the first part of this famous quote from William Shakespeare's Rome and Juliet has been widely used in a variety of contexts — from Umberto Eco's philosophical detective novel The Name of the Rose to a range of contemporary texts on gender, race, nationality or other identity issues. Juliet's optimistic position is effectively contradicted by the fate of the two lovers, as their family names doom their love to tragedy. Even without engaging in detailed analysis of how naming has been understood in cultural, social and linguistic theory, it is easy to see how two extreme positions have continued to struggle with each other.

At one end, 'nominalists' consider names to be arbitrary labels bearing no necessary relation to what they identify. Juliet's position suggests that names are only superficial conventions that do not affect the deeper meaning of existence. At the other extreme, 'realists' see names as strongly linked to objects and indeed crucial to their existence in the world. This is how Juliet's and Romeo's families might reason: for the Capulets and Montagues, names indeed meant everything, and at the end of the tragedy, the mortal fate of the lovers supports their position. By a strange twist, this is also what a third position would imply: 'constructionists' would argue that all social phenomena are the result of communicative discourses and have no separate existence outside them. Despite many mutual oppositions, a realist and a constructionist would agree that the question of what is a rose is impossible to even discuss without reference to the name of the rose: while one reduces language to a direct mirror of 'reality', the other in reverse reduces 'reality' to an effect of language use, whereas in contrast the nominalist understands name and reality as two separable entities.

In a general sense, names are words that in a given language denote and address something or someone, whether persons, collectives or things. On some relative level, each name requires and constructs a degree of unicity in its reference. The word 'dog' is thus a name for a unique family of animals, while 'Dog' may be used as name of a specific dog individual. Similarly, 'association for cultural studies' names a specific kind of associations, of which only one bears the name 'Association for Cultural Studies'. The names discussed here are standardised and intersubjectively constituted condensed verbal labels identifying specific individuals, groups, institutions or other social or geopolitical entities (rather than for instance natural objects or abstract ideas). They do not provide full definitions or descriptions of what they name, but being widely used they contribute to rendering it meaningful, since they — as word combinations — semantically and pragmatically link the named phenomenon to certain sets of values and ideas. Interpreting a name therefore shows how people have interpreted or given meaning to someone or something.

Some human and social categories have such a prominent position that they not only get more or less unique names but also are surrounded by various mythical narratives that are sometimes wed to a particular name, forming a symbolic association between denoted subjects, names and myths that mutually identify each other in fascinating ways. Unique among world continents, this is the case with Europe, sharing name with the female protagonist of the ancient myth of Europa and the bull.

Tracing the cultural history of the concept of 'myth' is again at least as difficult. A myth is a narrative of central value to a culture, binding people together in some way, and is linked to various rituals. From Greek antiquity until today, together with neighbouring concepts like fable, legend, story and tale, myth has had a typically ambivalent status. It may be read in almost oppositional directions. In one reading, myths are thought to codify important truths about something — existential insights that cannot be expressed in other ways, transmitting through history a kind of inner essence of a community, linking it to universal or at least long-term human predicaments. The structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss sees myth as a transmittable symbolisation of virtually timeless structural truths of society's fundamental but unconscious laws. Another example is when Karen Armstrong argues that 'mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality'.

However, myth is on the other hand often taken as fiction describing impossible events and thus as the untrue antithesis of reason, history and factual knowledge. As Paul Ricoeur has noted, a long tradition of ideology critique and 'hermeneutics of suspicion' has worked to undermine mythical force, rather than affirmatively listening to it. Myths may be seen as sets of utterances forming communicative systems that produce meaning. As signifying practices they can be interpreted, but they are particular kinds of signifying practices, forming a metalanguage that reflexively thematises 'ordinary' communication about reality. Roland Barthes argues that myth steals from language, and that critical interpretation therefore can steal back from myth to uncover its hidden truths. This form of ideology critique has affinities with Karl Marx' views on the critique of religion and bourgeois ideology, with Sigmund Freud's dream analysis and not least with how Walter Benjamin understood the 'realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up' as the 'paradigm of dialectical thinking'.

The fate of myth is thus to be revealing and/or deceptive: competing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1841505218
• ISBN 13: 9781841505213
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland